The Lost Creators Come Clean

Ten years later, they talk about their mistakes, their successes, the worst episode, and why we're all still talking about this damn show

Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse are seated around the infamous hatch from Lost. The duo, who became the voice of the ABC series during its six-season run, have met up in Lindelof's office on the WBR lot in Burbank to reflect on Lost's cultural legacy exactly ten years after shooting the show's pilot. This particular hatch is made of papier-mâché and smaller than you might imagine because it was used for exterior shots during a later season of the show, but it's still indescribably thrilling to find yourself hanging out at the hatch with these two guys.

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Lost premiered in September of 2004 and quickly spiraled into one of the most compelling, divisive shows on TV. Its unconventional, complexly wrought structure, enigmatic characters, and collection of perplexing mysteries became an immediate part of the cultural conversation, engaging fans in a truly obsessive way. It's arguable that no show since has generated such an extreme level of viewer involvement and debate that continues nearly four years after its finale aired. Lindelof and Cuse, who note that they hope to work together again in the future, remain as involved as the fans, and had some thoughts on why exactly Lost affected pop culture so deeply. Just don't ask them if you can take the hatch home with you.

ESQUIRE.COM: So I have one really burning question about Lost that has bothered me for years and I have to ask it first: In season one, why were Sayid's fingernails so weirdly long?

DAMON LINDELOF: Because Naveen Andrews liked to play the guitar between set-ups at night in an effort to lull the cast into submission. He's an amazing guitar player. I remember J.J. [Abrams] asking him about his nails when he came in to audition and Naveen was like, "Oh, I'd be happy to clip them but you'll just take away from me the one meaningful artistic expression I have in my life other than acting." Completely and totally deadpan in a way only Naveen can. But he did clip them at a certain point — or at least whittled them down. But they're aggressively long and disquieting.

CARLTON CUSE: That is a unique question. We have never been asked that. That's awesome because it's really hard to come up with an original Lost question so kudos to you.

DL: I wish we could back it to some sort of plot machination.

ESQ: It's the tenth anniversary of the show's premiere this year but when did Lost officially begin for each of you?

CC: Well, it started earlier for Damon since he wrote the pilot but we started working together after the first few episodes of the first season.

DL: I started in late January of 2004. That's the first time I met J.J. and it was the formal beginning of the show. We shot the pilot in March and April of 2004, and started writing the series in early June. I was with it until the end, which was May 2010.

ESQ: Literally the end and also that was the title of the finale, right?

DL: We wanted to make sure there was no ambiguity as to whether we were finished. We'll call the final episode "The End," we'll kill every major character off — and then not only kill them off but show what happens to them after they're dead. That's as far as you can go!

CC: We thought about reincarnation but that was just a step too far.

ESQ: That's for the inevitable reboot?

CC: I hope that the reboot involves reincarnation.

DL: I would suspect it does.

CC: I could see Jack as a grasshopper.

"The network brought the idea to us. The president of ABC wanted to do a drama he described as 'cast."

ESQ: How was Lost originally pitched to ABC?

DL: It was a slightly non-traditional pitch in that the network brought it to us. Lloyd Braun, who was the president of ABC at the time, wanted to do a drama that he described as "Cast Away: the series." He actually developed that idea with Aaron Spelling and a writer named Jeffrey Lieber. They developed a show called Nowhere, that was pretty much straight up a plane crashes on an island with survival stories. Lloyd spent the entire development season trying to make that work and it was not moving in the direction he wanted so he reached out to J.J., who was running Alias at the time. I'd been trying to get a job on Alias for a couple of seasons and so then I met with J.J. and we started from square one with Lost. Basically the network said, "Can you make this thing work?" We came back with all this stuff that was in the show. We wrote an outline in five days and then they greenlit the show based on this 20-page outline and we started writing the pilot as we were casting the show.

ESQ: Carlton, why did you want to be part of this show?

CC: I had hired Damon to work for me on the sixth season of Nash Bridges, which was three seasons earlier. We had stayed friends and stayed in touch and once the show got picked up J.J. made it clear he was going to leave after the pilot to go do Mission: Impossible III with Tom Cruise. While Damon was a fantastic writer, he was not an experienced showrunner so he started asking me for advice about how to manage the process. I just fell in love with the material. I thought it was really compelling and I thought there was an opportunity to do a show that was going to be special. We really made the show I think we wanted to see ourselves. Fortunately that was also a show that a lot of other people wanted to see, too.

We assumed people would stop asking us if we were making it up as we went along." —DAMON LINDELOF

ESQ: I was always very compelled by the series' narrative structure and how unique it was, especially at the time. At what point did you know this story couldn't be told chronologically?

DL: That was very early on. We understood that one of the challenges of the show was going to be that we had to slow things down. There was a natural inertia of the show for them to get off the island or for them to begin resolving some of the mysteries on the island. The flashback, on a narrative level, became a way of slowing down the storyline but also starting multiple stories in multiple places in time. We wanted it to allow us the largest canvas possible so when you step back from the show and look at the overall image, there were interesting things happening anywhere in the image. So when one place was running low on story you could go start work on another area until you suddenly realized how it connected again. The real exciting conversation happened in the middle of season three as we were begging ABC to end the show — the idea that the narrative device was going to flip out of flashbacks and into flashforwards. Once we did that we assumed people would stop asking us if we were making it up as we went along because you have to move forward on the trajectory you've set up.

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CC: We did something that no show had never done before, which was that we negotiated an end date three years out. In network television that was an unheard-of proposition. Network television operates under the assumption that you just run a show until you run it into the ground. You run it until people don't care anymore. We did not want to do that. We decided we would rather walk away than operate in that model. Once we had the end date it really allowed us to plan out what it was that we were going to do for the remaining three years of the show.

Arguably only 15 to 20 episodes were subpar, bordering on turds. It would be great to pretend those never happened." —DAMON LINDELOF

ESQ: Are you aware that there is someone who re-edited the entire series into chronological order?

DL: I heard that! I wish I had the time to watch that and I love it when fans reshape the story to fit their own specifications. But for us, so much time and energy went into designing these episodes. So the idea that someone unwound all that stuff just to tell the show in chronological order makes it the least interesting version of Lost. I watched the Godfather movies in chronological order and it was just so much worse.

CC: They actually asked us at one point if we would consider putting them together in chronological order and we said, "No, absolutely not." It just doesn't work. They weren't designed to be looked at that way.

ESQ: Did you ever get trapped in any corners while writing the show?

CC: I think a lot of times we intentionally painted ourselves into corners. As Damon used to say, "Well, then we'll just walk up the wall." That was a fun part of the storytelling — to create challenges for ourselves. The only place we ever got stuck was when we did things we regretted doing, not that they were narrative cul-de-sacs but like Nikki and Paulo. That was an example of a story idea where once we'd initiated it we regretted having done it. Or, on a smaller scale, when we told the story of Jack flashing back to Thailand and how he got his tattoos, we really regretted that we had decided that was a worthy flashback story. That story became really instrumental in convincing ABC that we needed to end the show. We were like, "Okay, this is what flashbacks look like now so it's probably a good idea if we figure out how much longer this show is actually going to go."

I think it's cringe-worthy, where Jack's flying the kite on the beach. It was not our finest hour." —CARLTON CUSE

DL: We did 121 hours of Lost. Arguably only 15 to 20 of them were subpar, bordering on turds. It would be great to pretend those episodes never happened, but I love the fact that we're still talking about Nikki and Paulo. Sometimes the mistake, the thing that wasn't good, is the thing that's really part of the legacy of a show like ours.

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ESQ: What was the worst episode of Lost?

CC: I mean, I think the episode where Jack gets his tattoos in Thailand. I think it's cringe-worthy, where he's flying the kite on the beach. It was not our finest hour. We used Matthew Fox's real tattoos. That's how desperate we were for flashback stories.

ESQ: Once the show started airing, when did you realize how engaged and committed the fans were?

DL: It happened fairly early on. We realized that our show was in the zeitgeist. Nobody really had a sense of whether anybody was going to watch the pilot and ABC was playing their cards very close to their chest about what their expectations were. But then it took on that cult life. Which is very rare because usually what defines a cult show is that there are not a lot of people watching it or it's on the verge of cancellation so people are rallying around it. But Lost had this huge viewership and it also had this cult fanbase.

It was the perfect thing for people to talk about over social media." —CARLTON CUSE

CC: One thing we never predicted was that as the show was launching there was also the advent of social media. We were making a show that was intentionally ambiguous and was a mystery. All of a sudden there was this vehicle by which people could communicate with each other over the Internet. The show and social media just happened to come along at the same time, and it was the perfect thing for people to talk about over social media. We benefitted from this natural confluence of events. It was just sort of alchemy.

ESQ: What was your favorite online Lost theory?

CC: There was a theory that it was all taking place in the dog's head.

One of the most popular theories was that they were in purgatory — that they had all died on the plane. That was not our favorite theory." —DAMON LINDELOF

DL: One of the most popular theories during the first season was that they were in purgatory — that they had all died on the plane. That was not our favorite theory because it feels like we were saying it in season one, we were saying it in season two, and we're saying it three years after the show ended that it wasn't that.

CC: It's okay, nobody believes us.

DL: We're as unreliable as narrators come. But then another popular theory was that the island itself was some sort of crashed spaceship and the hatch only fed into that thinking. The idea was when they blast this thing open and go down they're going to be inside of some UFO and then the island is just going to lift off out of the water and blast into space for season two. There was a part of me that was always like, "It would be so great if we actually did that!"

CC: We should just go back to like episode 30 and re-break from there and just make it a spaceship. That would be the unexpected reboot of Lost.

ESQ: Lost posed a lot of really big questions relating to ideas like good versus evil, science versus faith, and life after death. Do you think it successfully answered any of them?

CC: I think those are ultimately non-answerable questions and I think we tried to always be ambitious in our storytelling. We decided the worst thing we could do would be to play it safe. The show had become successful because we had made bold storytelling decisions and we had to continue to make them. We knew that some of these decisions would lead to a polarization among the fans. When you tackle unanswerable questions like "What is the nature of existence? What happens after you die? What is the meaning of our lives?" there are not empirical answers, but we tried to show how our characters were wrestling with those questions.

DL: When you talk about something like faith and science on a meta level, it doesn't matter what the show said. When the show ends there are still all these questions that are going to exist. Is there always a scientific explanation for everything in the natural world? Is there a God? The show isn't going to be able to answer that. But we were pretty clear and explicit in our storytelling as the show went on that we were committed to what would be defined as supernatural explanations for things versus natural explanations.

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ESQ: There were a lot of literary references and images of classic books on the show. If someone actually went and read all of that work, did it give them an augmented understanding of Lost?

CC: I think it would make you a fuller, richer person to digest all that literature. It might give you some answers to your life. But I don't think it will give you the answers to Lost. In the same way that music uses really interesting samples of other songs, I think there was a sampling. We wanted the show to reflect things that were meaningful to us. They all were part of the mosaic that made us who we are as storytellers so we wanted to acknowledge them to the audience.

ESQ: Was there something notable you feel like you learned from your experience on Lost?

Hindsight is 20/20, but the moral of the writing is that when you're feeling very scared about something and convinced that it could be a massive disaster, that's exactly the idea that you should do. " —DAMON LINDELOF

DL: Hindsight is 20/20, but the moral of the writing for me is that when you're feeling very scared and nervous about something and you're fairly convinced that it could be a massive disaster, that's exactly the idea that you should do. Although it sometimes turned out to be the wrong move, it's when we were pursing things that felt safe that the show was at its least interesting. "The Constant," which is arguably my and Carlton's favorite episode of the show and I know a lot of the fans share that sentiment, is an example. It wasn't like everyone looked at each other and said, "Ah ha!" There were two days of trying to talk ourselves out of it, saying, "We're never going to be able to pull this off." We'd start talking about a more traditional version and then we'd come back to it and get scared of it. So when you start to feel real fear of failure and disaster, don't blink. That's what you must do.

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